Let's write!

Choose two characters, preferably two that know each other in canon. They are together in a private place, such as walking down a forest path, watching TV in a room and no one else is within hearing range, or driving somewhere in a car. One of them takes the opportunity to talk to the other about something private. It could be good (e.g., they want to tell them a good secret like they just bought an engagement ring; they want to compliment the other; they want to share good gossip about someone else) or it could be bad (e.g., they want to chastise them about something bad they did; they want to share bad gossip about someone else) or even neutral (e.g. they want to talk to them about something that's troubling them).

Write that. Bonus points for not choosing the easiest-to-write conversation.

Write a scene in which one character is telling the other character something, and the second character does not believe them but doesn't want to say so directly. The catch? Don't communicate the second character's disbelief directly to the reader via their thoughts. Instead, only communicate their disbelief through their dialogue, expressions, or actions.

There are lots of ways the second character could react that doesn't contradict the first character but clearly shows that they don't believe them. They may glance away and clam up, or otherwise try to hide their expression. They may try to change the subject. They may pretend they didn't hear.

I went back and started reading my fills for this comm back in 2022, and this is the one I've chosen to critique:

https://tenminutesaday.dreamwidth.org/24874.html

The challenge was to take a scene from DW but write it using a different Doctor and companion pair, keeping in mind that with the new characters, with their personalities and goals different from the original, the scene might turn out completely different. I decided to rewrite the scene from "Enlightenment" in which the Guardians offer the prize to Turlough, with Rose and Ten substituted in for Turlough and Five.

In the original scene, the prize for winning the race was enlightenment, and when none of the Eternal teams win the race, the Guardians offer part of the prize to Turlough for helping -- a huge perfect diamond. Turlough had up until now been working for the Black Guardian, so the Black Guardian said that the prize was actually his, but he (Turlough) could take the prize if he gave up something of equal value, in this case, the Doctor. After consideration, Turlough chose to give the diamond to the Black Guardian, and the Doctor said that enlightenment wasn't the diamond, it was the choice. In other words, Turlough learned something about himself -- that though he was greedy by nature, he valued his friend above all the money in the universe -- through the choice he made.

That's what I tried to capture in the scene I wrote. Rose was a good stand-in for Turlough, as a teenager without much self-awareness and a healthy dose of greed, jealousy, and desperation. One of the things I think I did well in the scene was let Rose be tempted by the jewel but then try to take the high road and say that she doesn't need it.

The thing that I didn't do well was the subsequent part: I didn't make it clear what Rose was thinking when she finally made her choice, and thus the ending, where the Doctor walks off saying that "Enlightenment was the choice," was robbed of its meaning.

Unlike with Turlough, the Guardians don't make Rose choose between two things. Instead, the Guardians present Rose a choice of what her prize could be, and she decides she wants security, in specific, she wants to be secure in the knowledge that the Doctor loves her and will stay with her forever. After all, that's all she cared about in series 2. However, I was trying to be subtle with that and didn't make that clear. The only indication of this is the Black Guardian saying, "You wish to be assured of something," and that's it. It really needed to be stated outright that Rose thought that the crystal would make the Doctor love her.

Without that knowledge, the ending doesn't have any impact. The Doctor walks off because now he knows that all Rose really cares about is trying to own him, but that didn't come across at all.

I think the piece needed more of Rose's direct thoughts, especially right after the Black Guardian says the word "security". Maybe something like:

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Rose bit her lip. Security? Could this jewel answer all my questions? Could it finally make him say...?
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Even just that much could make the story so much clearer.

Your character is sitting in whatever room or place you're in right now, and this is the first time they've been there. Write a paragraph or two in first-person, in which they describe where they are.

Things you might want to keep in mind:

• The character will probably only describe what they're interested in, or at least would pay more attention to those things. For example, an engineer might describe the different tools next to the fireplace in detail, and ignore the pictures on the mantle. You can use this description to sketch the character's personality as much as to describe the room itself.
  
• The reader should be able to picture whatever it is that the character describes.
  

Word challenge today:

deity

For your ten minutes today, write about yourself. You do not have to post what you come up with -- you can just post that you did it.

You might talk about something that happened to you in your past, or something that you're hoping for in the future. You could talk about something great that's happened to you recently, or perhaps things that you've been thinking about.

You can also mess around with various ways of expressing this. It's probably easiest to think about writing a journal entry, or maybe even an autobiography, but instead, you could write it as a conversation with a friend, or as a letter to a friend. You could even write yourself as a character in a novel, speaking to another character or having an internal monologue.

Claustrophobia... what's the opposite of that, liking tight spaces? Claustrophilia? Anyway, today's challenge is to write about a single character having to traverse a tight space, like worming through the only exit hole after a cave-in, or doing maintenance on the Enterprise's Jeffries tubes, or trying to access their house's plumbing through the crawlspace.

The reader should know how the character feels about doing what they're doing. But, for an extra challenge, don't have the narrator or the character themself directly say what the character is thinking or feeling. Instead, craft the descriptions of the situation and the actions to communicate that. (You know, like, a person who considers the situation a challenge might "exert" to pull himself out, but someone who is really unhappy might "struggle".)

This is me losing track of time for the past week, seriously. I actually really couldn't tell when it was weekend and when it was weekday. Then I thought, "Hey, I haven't done anything in Ten Minutes for a while," and here I am. So sorry!

Today's challenge: Characterization. Choose three very different characters, who all speak and express themselves very differently. They do not need to be in the same fandom. Note down at the beginning of your work which three characters you chose. Then, write a few lines of conversation between them, about anything at all, but without dialogue tags or any prose. Your reader should be able to identify who's speaking by what they choose to say in the conversation and how they speak alone.

Today's challenge is not directly a writing challenge, but a conceptual challenge, or perhaps a design challenge. You're going to think long and hard (for ten minutes, anyway) about a character.

Take a character from your fandom or original work that you know very well and write down at least one of each of the following things.

1. A personality trait that comes out through how they speak (e.g. things they say, what words they choose, tone of voice)
2. An event from their past that either was traumatic or they regret a lot (or both!)
3. Some skill that they have trained in and are very good at

Then, place that character in an AU that's very different from their original world, such as an alien race, a different time period, or, if you want to stay in the same time period, a different nation/cultural background or even a wildly different socio-economic stratum. Now, do the same thing: design the character in this new world and write the same three things as listed above.

What you're doing is designing the character for the new AU but adapting what's important about them to the new world so that they're still the same character. This is a good exercise for learning to create your own characters.

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Example: Donna in Doctor Who is contemptuous of people she thinks are less intelligent and that comes out in her sarcastic jabs at people. One traumatic event in her past was the events of "The Runaway Bride" and the betrayal and then death of her fiance. She is very good with numbers and knows how companies and offices (and company politics) work very well.

In a Regency AU, let's make Donna a genteel lady, but she's nouveau riche, having grown up in a successful merchanting family that bought their way into gentility. So, she still has the London accent and the non-genteel manner of speaking, and she's not afraid to insult her less-intelligent, less-capable peers in a crude manner. She's unmarried, but only because she had been engaged to a gentleman who'd broken off the engagement (a big no-no back in the Regency) and married someone else -- that's Donna's traumatic event. Having grown up in a merchanting family, she knows how to run a shop and a house.